Tim Cook just gave his troops a pep talk, and the mission is crystal clear: Apple has to win in AI. At an all-hands meeting this week, the Apple CEO reportedly told employees that when it comes to artificial intelligence, the company is not here to play catch-up; it is here to claim the crown. “Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab,” Cook reportedly declared, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
This internal rally comes right after Apple’s latest earnings call, where Cook told Wall Street that AI investment is about to ramp up significantly. Translation? Apple’s about to go from whispering about AI to shouting it from the rooftops.
Yes, Apple has already been sprinkling AI across its products, branding it as Apple Intelligence, but the real show, like the long-promised Siri glow-up, is still stuck in traffic. Meanwhile, competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have been zooming ahead with their AI sizzle reels and buzzy tools.
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Cook, though, is not too bothered by being fashionably late. “We have rarely been first,” he reportedly said. “There was a PC before the Mac, a smartphone before the iPhone, a tablet before the iPad, and an MP3 player before the iPod.” Apple did not invent the category. It reinvented it.
That is the bet again. AI might already be everywhere, but Apple is banking on being the one to make it elegant, useful, and, of course, beautifully packaged. The AI race may have started without Apple, but if history’s any clue, it might just finish in Cupertino. The question is, can Apple turn “better late” into “best in class” again?
